Thursday, July 30, 2009

Web You.Oh

I'm writing a report on various online social networking/web 2.0 options for an organization to which I belong. This will basically be a summary with recommendations. What's out here, why/how it works, whether or not it would be of any value to our organization, what it would cost in terms of time and/or money to maintain and fund with meaningful content, etc.

Help!

Fortunately, I don't have to do the maintenance, just the summary and recommendations. But where to start?

A robust website with updated activity calendar is a given. I think Facebook is important. If the staffer in charge of this stuff on an ongoing basis is interested in blogging, that could be great. S/he could have a blog that feeds to Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc.

I'm prejudiced, though. I don't Twitter or follow anyone on Twitter. I also power my car by running my feet against the pavement hard enough to rotate its stone wheels.

What does your organization or business do to promote itself? I've got my opinions (as yet uncoalesced into a neat report; I have two more days to finish!) but would love any and all suggestions.

Hit me!

(Thanks)

4 comments:

Susan O said...

My company just got into yammer. Yammer is like Twitter, but it's for a very specific organization or workplace....so the tweets tend to be oriented to that place. So far, we're finding it really helpful in finding out what's going on in our organization--since the tweets are short, it's not onerous at all.

Other than that, facebook is ubiquitous these days (buying ads on facebook BTW is CHEAP, and you can focus it to a specific geography, etc.

I have had some fun with ning--again a facebook LIKE group but limited to a specific population.

Cate said...

I would go for something, probably a blog, that could feed into any/all of the other things. That would allow the users to look at it as they like. Follow it on facebook, or have updates emailed to them, or just look at it when they please.

It's so frustrating to have a group change its communication method with every new thing that comes along. One group I'm in has migrated from an email list, to a web site, to a yahoo group. It seems like they spend way too much time coordinating how they'll deliver information rather than actually delivering any information.

Sorry, I don't think I quite answered your question. It's just a pet peeve for me.

Fran Caldwell said...

Will take a look at Yammer. And, Cate, I so agree with you. In fact, I think some really prefer exhibiting their cleverness with the whole setup rather than the content...

Sarahlynn said...

This was so so so helpful. Thanks very much!

Susan, Yammer looks cool for big companies. We don't have a lot of users @the same domain, but Ning could be really useful for us.

Cate, that's going to be my recommendation. Blogger can feed Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc. Yay, RSS!

I'm with both of you, Fran and Cate, about constant tweaking of delivery mechanism.